A Heart-to-heart with Israel

I want to take this Palestinian-Israeli story beyond the mind-numbing chatter about the details of hatred and violence. I am tired of debating the mechanics of malevolence close to a century into this conflict. Facts matter—they will always matter—but, whichever way our convictions choose to read them, they are mere foot soldiers in this bloodletting.

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I want to travel further into the realms of psyche and implication, into those of mindset and devastating aftereffect, because when facts kill, they kill for them.

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Dana Olmert, Yigal Arens, Avraham Burg and Avinadav Begin do not seal my last post as petty taunts. I do not float their names to state the very obvious: that dissent in Israel has reached the progeny of even its fiercest keepers. I am not embracing their rebellion the way I, in my younger college years in the US, latched on to Ahad Ha’am’s reservations about Herzel’s political zeal or marveled at Martin Buber’s spiritualism as evidence of a once tentative, self-questioning Zionism—if not self-questioning of its rights, then self-questioning of their impact on the rights and lives of others.

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I mention these angry children of Israel because 59 years ago, when political Zionism declared itself triumphant over its spiritual and cultural adversaries and Arab enemies, Israeli euphoria would give in only to the seduction of happy dreams. The naggings of nightmares were for the losers. I mention them because 59 years ago, when Israel became flesh and blood and thought it had finally laid to rest that ageless “Jewish Question,” Palestinian exodus seemed—even for those Zionists who acknowledged the injustice of it--a reasonable sacrifice for “Jewish Return.” There was no room then for qualms and foresight. The horror of the Holocaust was too recent, the righteousness of the Cause was too intoxicating and the opportunity in Palestine too compelling. Fifty-nine years ago the future of a messianic, exultant Zionism was intangible, but now it has become the real past, and on its surface yesterday’s dire predictions have bloomed into these children’s scathing verdicts. That is why I mention them.

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In protesting thus, are they not pleading with their country for more meaningful conversations about the possibilities of salvation for them and for this worn-out Middle East? Have we all not lived in this quagmire long enough to know that the misfortune of one people is not necessarily a windfall for the other?

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But there stands a flummoxed Israel, so mighty and yet so frightened, still hanging on to the promise in hellish scenarios. Shall it be yet another Palestinian transfer, as Avigador Lieberman demands, or shall it be permanent dominion over them? Shall it be 50 little Bantustans or one quadriplegic, deaf and mute, tiny Palestine? Dare we ponder the comeback of the Jordanian flag over a mutilated West Bank and Egyptian care for a destitute and seething Gazan Hammastan?

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Does Israel not see that Ze’ev Jabotinsky, that most fervent of Zionists, was right when he said of the Palestinians, “…they are not a rabble but a living people?” Do the raging fires of the past 60 years not tell it how wrong he was when he found his answer for Palestinian acquiescence written on an “Iron Wall?” Do they not understand that they cannot be in the Middle East but not of it? If a thriving IT sector, a robust economy and a healthy stock exchange brighten up the picture for Israel, don’t the people’s anxieties about the longevity of the state that permeate every poll and the fading sheen of military power as panacea make it a tad bit darker?

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Not a history replete with damning evidence, not the voices within and not the clamor without seem to be making a dent as Israel’s leaders, politicians and generals alike, go about their business of audaciously dressing up bigotry and cruelty as workable solutions for their people and ours.

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I am writing this as news trickles in about the killing of five UNIFEL Spanish soldiers in Southern Lebanon. Here’s one murderous act that exposes the mindsets meeting across divides to bring this country down. In identifying the guilty hands, one is at a loss between an Israel that has been agitating for another round to reclaim for the Israeli military its fading luster and help Lebanon and Hezbollah sink deeper into their morass; extremist Palestinian elements hitting in the South to spread the turmoil in the North; a Syria anxious to make the summer a very hot season for all of us.

Allah Yustur (God shield us). But I doubt he will.

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More conversations with Israel, the Arabs and Palestinians in my next post.

Chapter Three: Finita La Musica

Waddi’, as in Say Goodbye!

Let’s make this a new chapter and move on as we go backward.
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Beirut on a Sunday in June. A brisk, early swim—alone. None of the usual souls is at the pool four days after the assassination of Walid Eido, one of Sa’ad Harriri’s mps. I remember that line in The Year of Living Dangerously: “And so it begins.” Of course, it was a love affair these words were ushering in. No tentative whispers or fluttering butterflies here, just the footsteps of ominous beginnings.
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Sure, the omens had long lit the way to this moment—if you care to look back, they dress every paragraph of Pieces of me In This--but now you can actually see societies, a battered culture, self-respect, delusions, about to shatter all over the floor. We used to live our outbursts, more or less, one at time, but catastrophe does not care for timid displays of its gifts anymore; it wants to parade them in full regalia.
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Slow-motion collapse is eerie. The banal and the calamitous share the day’s space, blithely chatting away the ticking seconds, as people swing between routine and disaster. Soon, perhaps, soon the action may overrun us Lebanese in fast-forward—like Gaza this very minute, like Iraq three years ago.
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Look around you! These are not landscapes of political devastation you glimpse—devastation is for the birds, for the editorial pages; it has been sitting amongst us like a nonagenarian grandfather muttering every once in a while incomprehensibly. What those eyes of yours behold is a panorama of Arab shame on which is etched every imaginable visage of indecency.
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I am already well into a Tuesday. It is not the seventy-eight killed in a suicide bombing in a Shiite mosque in Baghdad that bespeak of an Iraqi nation in utter despair, it is those orphaned children with severe disabilities naked on the floor and chained to their beds (Al Hayyat, June 20, 2007). We can, with some persuasiveness, blame Iraqi fratricide on too many years of Saddam, or on foreign cabals in cahoots with local partners, but in front of the door of what Zionist or American conspiracy do we Arabs dump this humanitarian tragedy? Under what excuse do we shove such cruel behavior towards the weakest, the most helpless, the real innocents in this Iraqi family? What good is a country’s glorious past if its present finds it in such ignominy? Of what use are memories of greatness when, in the here and now, our conduct is so disgraceful? It is understandable that the Iraqi state is overwhelmed, that the Iraqi people are shellshocked, but is it fathomable that we collectively should succumb to such moral depravity? You’re not going to throw at me that Rumsfeldain gem, are you? “Stuff happens.” You’re not going to mention the street children of Brazil, or the child soldiers of Congo? That only adds to their dishonor but it takes nothing away from ours.
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And it is not the gunfire between Hamas and Fatah in the streets of Gaza that exposes a Palestinian leadership oscillating between madness and idiocy, between perfidy and contemptibility; it is the sight of a pair of glazed eyes staring out of the face of a Palestinian child as he waits for his family’s turn to march away from Gaza into yet another exile—that eternal Palestinian exile.
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Not so long ago, instability in our region was boring; unimaginative in its violence, predictable even in its surprises. But there is something of the capricious and unknowable in this bedlam. Not only the lame amongst us are feeling the punishing rewards of their stupidity, the smart ones who have long trifled with them are also facing the unintended afterclaps of their own cleverness. While the Palestinians agonize from the near-fatal wounds inflicted by their pathetic imitation of a resistance, Israel squirms from the terrifying corrosiveness of a colonial mentality that mocks its democratic Jewishness as it eats its way through the last of the two-state solution. While Hamas brings into full circle the incompetence, the fecklessness, the boundless cynicism, that started with Yasser Arafat, Israel ponders four million traumatized Palestinians whose multiplying numbers are the true and only measure of their hope for meaningful recognition.
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How anachronistic is it for the Derchewitzes and Finklesteins to debate the right and wrong of Zionism, when on the ground are gathered millions of Palestinians irritating every Israeli fait accompli and breathing life into that most mortifying of possibilities: an Israeli-Palestinian bi-national state! How mystified Israel must be that the murder of one half-good idea—two people, two states--can so furtively bring birth to the ruinous notion of one post-Zionist state for all. Impossible? Sure. Now.
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But what do you do with an occupied people who refuse to die or go away, crouching, furious and spent with barely anything to lose, at your doorstep? How many times do you pummel them, how many monsters do you breed in their midst, how many of their “moderate” leaders do you turn into straw men, how many of their God-obsessed fighters do you first feed and caress and then demonize, how many check points do you erect to humiliate them, how much of their land do you grab, how many of their resources do you confiscate, how many settlements do you implant on their expanse, how many settlers do you spread between them, how tall, how permanent, of a wall do you build to isolate them, before you realize that inhumanity kills both ways?
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If all this pain is administered for survival, for security, for protection against a treacherous subhuman lot, why do I find you, Israel, in the throes of an existential crisis? Why the befuddlement and the nervous sweat? Why the harsh censure from Avraham Burg, the one-time head of your Knesset and Youssuf Burg’s son? Why such disillusionment in Moshe Arens’ son? Why the fury of Ehud Olmert’s daughter? Why the anti-wall protests by Menachem Begin’s grandson? You say this is proof that you are Democracy itself. They are saying, This is precisely because you are not.
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Be patient! My thoughts are still in mid-stream.

Batikh Ykassir Ba’ado

Let Watermelons Break Each Other/as in A Plague Upon Both Your Houses

If you are disappointed that the rumpus in Nahr al Bared is settling into a monotonous rhythm, don’t be. We are still in the very early hours of this traggedia, as we like to call our misadventures in Franco-Araab. While information, good and bad, will keep seeping out of “anonymous” sources about Fath al Islam and the rising tide of Islamic fundamentalism in our refugee camps, the real show is actually playing somewhere else—in the political arena. And since we all have a strong feeling that we are barely scratching the surface of this morass, it only makes sense to dip our heads a little deeper for a closer look at the evils breeding at the bottom of it.

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The 12 refugee camps in Lebanon teeming with 425,000 of the wretched of Palestinian earth have long been home to every rent-a-cause kiosk conjured by our Arab brethren. For decades, they have been destinations for regional bullies in search of mercurial mercenaries and hideouts for roughnecks looking to change their footprints after every bad act. And why wouldn’t they be? There, people with no claim to any happy dream live in permanent tension with open sewage, overflowing garbage, overcrowded housing, promises unfulfilled, life not lived; there, people live as if on islands of oblivion, not quite visible to our leaders, not quite mattering to theirs.

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Fath al Islam may be the criminal of the month but it is only one of many groups most of whose time is spent thinking up ever grislier interpretations of and commands by the Quran. With an al Qaeda-like obsessiveness with the sinfulness of others that is constantly itching for spilt blood, their willingness to unleash terror throughout Lebanon is as certain as the waywardness of their faith. Whether they have the capacity—the sleeper cells, the backup, the mobility underground—to do so is not quite as evident.

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Hence even if the Lebanese army kills Fath al Islam’s ring leader Shaker Abbsi and every single one of his foot soldiers, Pandora might still be standing there with her box about to crack open. These largely foreign fighters may have been alien to Nahr al Bared but their appearance in it says much about both the Lebanese government (and Syrian efforts) that helped ease their way in and the Hobbsian conditions that tolerated their presence there. The question of the Palestinians in Lebanon—the destitution in which they live, the Palestinian Authority’s deteriorating influence over them, the mountain of arms in the hands of a sea of “liberators” of every non-religious persuasion or Jihadist motivation--has raced to the fore and the answers to it have become ever more pressing. Fath al Islam, as urgent as its specific case is now, is symptomatic of a festering malignancy that will not respond to our state’s favorite remedy: bazzi w lazzi’, spit and stick (remember that one from a very early Thinking Fits post?).

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Moreover, just as this extremist group blew the lid off the indefensible autonomous status of the refugee camps, it made Hezbollah’s unilateral disarmament practically unachievable. For the Sunni fanaticism that breeds in these places is as grave a threat to the interests of Hezbollah and the safety of the Shiite community as it is to the authority and stability of the state—or so Hezbollah shall argue with much credibility. It makes absolutely no sense anymore to speak of Hezbollah’s arms when conditions inside these camps have grown from very inconvenient to out-and-out perilous.

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It has thus become startlingly clear that whatever fixes the Lebanese government has in its bag they cannot be short term, they cannot be cosmetic, they cannot only involve firepower and they necessarily have to string together some mighty intelligence fieldwork and bold political moves.

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And this is just the easy part.

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This Lebanese crisis, like all the previous ones, is as much about regional intrigues as it is about internal maladies. The Rafiq Hariri international tribunal that has just passed in the UN’s Security Council under Chapter Seven of the UN Charter, as critical as it is for the Syrians, does not swim alone in this region’s pool of peace-threatening problems. Although this country’s immediate quandary has its roots in Syria’s furious and bloody reaction to the loss of the only jewel in its crown, the exit from it will not necessarily lead us to salvation. The files in the hands of the powers which collectively, but very often competitively, preside over us are many and the issues packing them are complicated and thorny.

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The short of it is that Lebanon is meeting this latest test at a time when those who hate it and those who could care less about it far outnumber and outmuscle those who feel sorry for it. Mind you, the players manning the first two fronts are the peripatetic type. Depending on the stakes, they switch sides without even a pause. They may hate each other but towards us—subhan al Allah (Goodness Lord!)--their feelings are disturbingly chummy.

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Not coincidently, of course, the unkindness of those on the outside is playing footsie yet again with the feebleness of those on the inside: The near-paralyzed Lebanese government (whether it admits it or not) is grappling with the ramifications of breathtakingly irresponsible tactics that are making the plots against it easier to realize; the people are utterly demoralized; our educated youth is jumping this sinking ship; the state’s intelligence apparatus is less amenable to its orders than it is to the Syrians’; and our political class—the opposition and March 14th combined—has shown itself scandalously blasé about this country’s daunting challenges.

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Are you depressed yet, or do you just hate me?

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I cannot deny that this pretty much reads like a you-might-as-well-shoot-me-in-the-head scenario, but all I have done is set up the atmosphere for you; it is up to you to adjust the lights to your liking. For a happy thought, you might want to start with a Syrian-American deal that delivers to the tribunal two or three Syrian intelligence hoods, all arranged courtesy of Saudi Arabia and Iran. This deal is both conceivable and possible now that the court has been approved. Beyond this generous gesture, for a brighter picture you had better bring in those neon lights.